About Studybugs

Studybugs provides a unique communication platform for children’s health, used by thousands of schools
and parents across the UK. In partnership with the NHS and other public health organisations, Studybugs
tracks what bugs are going around and passes on expert advice to keep children healthy and in school.

History

It all started when one of the co-founder’s young children came down with scarlet fever. Only after
being misdiagnosed by four doctors did he discover one of her school friends had been ill with scarlet
fever shortly before. If that information had been available earlier the diagnosis would have been
obvious.

So we came up with the idea of building an app for collecting anonymised data on what bugs are going
around. We decided to concentrate on schools as notorious places for spreading illnesses, and working
with local schools we built a system that makes it easy and secure for parents to report when their
children are off sick. We soon found there were many further benefits and have gone on to build the
system into what it is today.

Studybugs was launched in April 2014 by co-founders Alex Lovelock-Wren, Jeremy Mabbitt and Joanna
Mabbitt. In September 2015 we were awarded backing from the Open Data Institute (co-founded by Sir Tim
Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web) to help accelerate our collection of open data for the
benefit of public health. Originally called ‘Sickly’, we changed our name in March 2016 to reflect the
increasing breadth of our work.